Prophet's Prey by Sam Brower Page A

Merilyn and the baby were in danger, and he rushed to Sacramento, arriving in time to actually help bring the boy into the world.
    By itself, the birth could not have been regarded as a significant event. After all, the boy was Rulon’s third child that year, and number fourteen overall, including the two by his divorced original wife, Zola. There would be many more children to come, but Warren would outshine them all. From his first breaths, Warren was favored by his forty-six-year-old father.
    The spindly, far-sighted boy was born during a particularly turbulent time within the movement. Only two years earlier, in 1953, the politically ambitious governor of Arizona sent more than a hundred police officers into Short Creek to put a stop to the illegal practice of polygamy. Dozens of men were arrested and 263 children were swept into custody. The ensuing national publicity that included photographs of policemen snatching crying children from their mothers tilted national sympathy to the side of the polygamists, who claimed they were just an innocent religious minority being persecuted by an oppressive government. Like an ebbing tide, the Arizona government had retreated from Short Creek. The FLDS, however, never forgot the lessons of the “’53 Raid.” Although Rulon’s base was in Utah, and therefore exempt from the Arizona action, the constant fear of government was the primary reason that he scattered his wives over several states.
    Even as a child, Warren automatically had a special standing within the fundamentalist community through his powerful father. Some recalled him as a spoiled brat and a tattletale, the golden boy who could do no wrong. Beyond the walls of the family compound, however, the skinny and fragile boy had a difficult time. One of his aunts described for me the day during his first year of middle school when Warren had to go to the bathroom, but was too timid to raise his hand and ask permission. He wet his pants. The telltale wet spot drew the attention of other students, who taunted him unmercifully. Such incidents contributed to his already introverted behavior.
    As he grew, Warren was petrified when it came to girls. When some of his brothers tried to drag him outside to talk to some girls on a visit to a relative’s ranch, he broke down crying, ran away, and locked himself in the family pickup truck. Although fearful of personal encounters with the opposite sex, young Warren was definitely interested in them, just not in normal, healthy adolescent ways. By the age of eight, he already had developed a reputation as a voyeur.
    I interviewed a female relative who told me that her household had a special routine they put in motion upon receiving word that Warren would be coming for a visit. All of the girls and women taped newspapers over their windows to prevent him from peeping in, and they stuffed towels beneath their doors because Warren would try to slide a mirror underneath in hopes of catching them in various stages of undress. “He was notorious for that stuff, even at that age,” she told me.
    The host family could not scold the boy and order him to stop peeping. He was the favorite son and off limits to criticism, something that would become another lifelong trait. As Carolyn Jessop recalled in Escape , her penetrating book about her life in the FLDS, “No one stood up to Warren.”
    While not the physical equal of many others in public school, he was brighter than most, and he graduated with honors from high school, skilled in math and science. Warren’s graduation was perfectly timed, perhaps a little too perfect to be coincidental, because his father at that moment made a decision to build a private school specifically to meet the educational needs of the growing mass of children from fundamentalist families in the Salt Lake area. Too many things that were taught in public classrooms were religiously unpalatable and in stark contrast with what the